In Paula's race, but from a very different world By Simon Turnbull in Athens

22 August 2004

Outside the Olympic Village on the northern outskirts of Athens, the early
morning queue of visitors is steadily growing. Near the front are three young
women carrying little cases. If you look closely at their black tee-shirts you
can see the initials "WADA" and the legend "win pure". These
are the ladies from the World Anti-Doping Agency, the testers who have had
Konstantinos Kenteris and Katerina Thanou so famously on the run.

Not far behind them is Gary Lough - husband, manager, training partner and
mentor of Paula Radcliffe. The sight of a member of the British press corps
about to follow him into the village is probably not what he wants to see,
having gone to great lengths to shield his other half from media attention
leading up to her date with destiny on the road from Marathon to the
Panathinaiko Stadium today.

But it is not the fastest entrant in the women's marathon field that The
Independent on Sunday has come to see. It is the slowest.

Beyond the check-point, in the café in the international zone, Agueda Amaral
is already waiting. There is not much of her, just 4ft 11in, but her big brown
eyes, her huge smile and her sunny disposition more than make up for any lack of
physical presence. Her best time in 21 marathons is 3hr 3min 53sec. So how does
it feel for her to be running against a woman who has run the 26 miles 385 yards
of the marathon distance in 2:15.25 - to run against the great Paula Radcliffe.

Amaral gives a shrug of the shoulders and the smile turns to a frown.
"Who?" she enquires. "I don't know the name.

"You say she has run a marathon in two hours 15 minutes?" she adds,
her face a mixture of bemusement and wonder. "That is very quick. Very
quick."

Jordao Henrique, an official with the two-strong Olympic team from Timor-Leste,
leans forward and interjects. "You must understand that football is the
only famous sport in East Timor," he says. "Athletics, we know very
little about."

"I have heard of Carl Lewis," Amaral adds. "The
American."

Four years ago in Sydney, Amaral stepped on to the Olympic stage that was
once graced by the American sprinter. Her country was newly independent and
still recovering from the genocidal ravages wrought by Indonesian militia in
1999. A quarter of Timor's population was wiped out.

Amaral competed in Sydney in the white vest of the International Olympic
Committee, stopping as soon as she reached Stadium Australia and bending to kiss
the track. Officials had to kneel down and tell her to complete a lap of the
arena.

She laughs with embarrassment at the memory. "Nobody told me before the
race that I had to run around the track," she says.

Amaral was 43rd of 45 finishers in the 2000 Olympic women's marathon. She
eventually crossed the finish line in 3:10.55, to be greeted by a rapturous
reception. And rightly so.

When the Indonesian militia went on the rampage, Amaral fled to the mountains
from her home in Dili, the Timorese capital. It was reported when she ran in
Sydney that she and her children had been separated from her husband and had
lived in a refugee camp, sleeping next to a dirt road.

"That is not true," she says. "We lived in the mountains until
the killings stopped. My husband, Antonio, was with me and with my children,
Oirsia, Dahlia and Sanora. I was pregnant with our little boy, Ronaldo. He is
four now."

When the family returned to Dili their home had been ransacked and Amaral's
running shoes were missing. "I started running when I got back from the
mountains," she reflects. "I had to go barefoot. I had no shoes."

When she ran in Sydney, nobody back home could share in her three hours of
fame. "There was no electricity," Henrique says. "There were not
many televisions, but nobody could watch anyway. It will be different this
time."

Four years on, life is sweeter for the 32-year-old Amaral and for her
compatriots. She works as a security officer at the Timorese government's
headquarters and trains with the Tacil Tolu Sports Field Club in Dili.

At the Opening Ceremony in Athens eight days ago, it was she who carried the
Timor-Leste flag. "It was a proud, proud moment for me," she says. She
does not, however, know which colours she will be wearing as the first official
Timorese competitor at an Olympic Games.

"Ah," Henrique says, raising an index finger. "That is a
problem. Agueda has brought an orange vest to run in. Gil da Cruz Trinidade, who
runs in the men's marathon next week, has brought a green vest.

"The International Olympic Committee have given us two days to sort out
the problem. The trouble is we don't have a team uniform with a badge, like the
other countries."

It is impossible not to laugh. No slight is intended. It is simply refreshing
to have the over-hyped world of high pressure sport reduced to the basics of a
schools' sports day.

"Sport in East Timor is not like sport in America, Australia,
Britain," Henrique says, wrongly detecting an insult. "People do not
go to sport to get money. My people go to sport to fight with their heart."

And long may they do so. Forget all about Konstantinos Kenteris and Katerina
Thanou and their whole Greek farce. Strip behind the rotten veneer that has been
applied to these Athenian Olympic Games and you will find such gleaming sources
of inspiration as the 4ft 11in Timor woman who will be somewhere in Radcliffe's
wake tonight.

She will also, of course, be treading in the historical foosteps of
Pheidippedes and Spiridon Louis on the road from Marathon to Athens. Agueda
Amaral shrugs her slender shoulders once again.

"Spiridon who?" she says. Like the long-distance deeds of Radcliffe,
news of the original Olympic marathon has yet to reach Timor, evidently.